Our holdings include hundreds of glass and film negatives/transparencies that we've scanned ourselves; in addition, many other photos on this site were extracted from reference images (high-resolution tiffs) in the Library of Congress research archive. (To query the database click here.) They are adjusted, restored and reworked by your webmaster in accordance with his aesthetic sensibilities before being downsized and turned into the jpegs you see here. All of these images (including "derivative works") are protected by copyright laws of the United States and other jurisdictions and may not be sold, reproduced or otherwise used for commercial purposes without permission.

Samuel Clemens looks like a man who knows that he will have the last laugh at his peers. Knowing that their great-grandchildren will be the only ones to read his autobiography. It will be finally published this year around November I think, as it was his desire that it not be published until 100 years after his death.

Also, as a side-note, I find incredibly interesting how contemporary his glasses are. Though somewhat mangled, they look like they are right off the rack at at Lenscrafters.

It is nice to see a great man standing tall in the last year of his life. Besides being a wonderful author he was a beloved statesman and humorist. My first book to read cover to cover was his "Adventures of Tom Sawyer."

Somewhere off camera is Clemens's youngest daughter Jean, age 29, who three days later, on Christmas Eve at her father's Connecticut estate, was found drowned in her bathtub after an epileptic seizure.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.